Janet Daley was born in America where she began her political life on the Left as an undergraduate at Berkeley. She moved to Britain (and to the Right) in 1965 where she spent nearly twenty years in academic life before becoming a political commentator: all factors that inform her writing on British and American policy and politicians.

Questioned at the Public Administration Committee about the Coalition's tendency to make major shifts in policy direction with alarming impulsiveness, Oliver Letwin has insisted that all such changes have been in accordance with "planned strategic aims". This seemed to provoke some incredulity in the Committee's chairman, Bernard Jenkin, who pointed out that "some policies seem to have come out of the blue."

Was the abrupt change on Child Benefit, Mr Jenkin asked, a planned strategic aim? This decision to take what is now a universal benefit away from households in which any member paid tax at the higher rate, had arrived – you may recall – like a thunderbolt on the eve of the last but one Tory party conference, thus derailing the entire proceedings and ensuring that no other matter of substance would be discussed for the rest of the week. Mr Letwin was unbowed. He told the Committee that the decision on this policy change had taken "some time to make". How long I wonder? As long as it took to scribble it on the back of an envelope? Not long enough, clearly, for the blindingly obvious flaw in its design to become clear: that households with children in which two people both earned just below the level of higher rate tax – say, 80,000 pounds per year betwen them – would keep their benefit while single-earner households earning say, 43,000 pounds per year, would lose theirs. If the "planned strategic aim of this policy" was to create an absurdly unfair policy while alienating a constituency of conscientious familes who should be natural Tory voters, then it will have succeeded beyond expectations.

PS Just a note to our millionaire Chancellor and Prime Minister: the sum which will be lost to families with two children in which one parent pays tax at the higher rate would cover the cost (roughly) of clothing, shoes, school uniforms, PE kit and a couple of school trips for those two children for a year.